by Kalina, Mark
Freya shook her head, removing overrides from the less intense pain signals; too many pain overrides made her dizzy and disoriented. Briefly she looked herself over. Her uniform had kept the fire and hot debris from burning her too badly. No doubt it was singed, but that didn't show on the black material. She started forward towards the skimmer, finding that she could walk normally without the pain overrides messing up her balance. The pain from everything but the burns was tolerable, and she left the override on for those. She made her way around to the front of the skimmer, now facing backwards to the direction they had come from. The front windscreen was cracked and warped with heat, but the pilot-side door was open, smoke pouring out of it in thick clouds. There was no sign of Muir.
The skimmer had left a gouge in the soft turf of the clearing where they had crash landed. The little aircar had skidded through the clearing and into the trees. It had spun and come to rest against a tall, thick "tree." Green-blue "tree" trunks rose all around.
A motion made her look up. A man in a tan jumpsuit with a red racing helmet was stepping towards her from around one of the trees. He held the pulse laser forward in a basic combat stance. Freya swayed where she stood as her muscles tensed. She had no weapons and knew that there was no way she could get to cover. A telestraal adept would have instinctively known where the cover was, could have moved for it without the slightest hesitation, but her own limited training had seemingly deserted her. She found herself recalling one of the first tenets of telestraal: Bring a gun to a gun fight.
The man stood and, with his other hand, raised the polarized face shield of the helmet. The face, pale, framed with red-blond hair, seemed vaguely familiar. The man smiled and brought the laser up to aim at her head.
Muir, holding a pocket needler, stepped around a tree on the man's left and fired. The burst of a half-dozen high explosive needles stitched into the man's side with a rapid snapping sound. The man's body jerked. The narrow eyes went wide and blood flowed from his mouth, pooling in the helmet's chin-guard and overflowing to drip onto the forest floor. The laser fell from his hand, and the man slumped and dropped silently.
Freya stood staring for a moment, and then let herself slump down as well, in relief, till she was sitting on the soft ground.
---
Nas Killick, captain of the Whisperknife took a deep breath and stretched. It was a luxurious feeling. It had been more than ten hours of claustrophobic immobility in his command pod, acceleration gel engulfing him, all commands, all sensorium, coming thought direct interface. It felt good to stretch.
Whisperknife had been substantially faster than the guard-ships, which was no surprise, but even so, it had been a narrow enough margin, with two guard-ships and their deployed gunships all trying to intercept the void-runner swift-ship.
The gunships were dangerous. They were small manned ships with a powerful short-duration plasma drive; they could outrun a swift-ship, maintaining almost nine gees, though it was hard on the human pilot, even encased in acceleration gel and flying the gunship through direct interface.
Two guard-ships meant four gunships, armed with a dozen warheads each. Four gunships, if they had attacked together, could have overwhelmed the defenses of the Whisperknife, though it would have cost them. The answer to that was to keep them from linking up, keep them off balance. Instead of running, Whisperknife had attacked, vectoring to intercept the gunships before they linked up, forcing them to break off and scatter. The danger was that the maneuver took Whisperknife almost into laser range of the leading guard-ship, which outgunned the swift-ship better than four-to-one.
Nas had flown Whisperknife through the eye of that needle, keeping out of effective laser range of the larger ship and boosting away before the gunships could regroup. Luckily, the gunships were short-duration, powered by super-conducting power coils. The maneuvers, first trying to attack, and then to get away from the Whisperknife, had run down their power and the four small ships were forced to match vectors with the guard-ships and dock to recharge.
By that time, Whisperknife was far enough from the gas giant Yuro V to initiate an FTL transit, leaving the guard-ships helplessly guessing where the swift-ship had gone.
And that, Nas thought with a smile, was the best part of it. The guard-ships would be considering the nearby systems, both the inhabited ones and the lifeless ones. They might even pursue, though the odds of them forcing a fleeing ship to engage were not great even if they guessed right and transited to the same system that their quarry had escaped to; they would have to emerge in the system close enough to force an engagement before the fleeing ship could restabilize her reactor and transit again.
That wouldn't have been a concern for the Whisperknife under normal circumstance; she was faster than a guard-ship. But given what they had done in the course of destroying the empty freight-liner, Nas suspected that Fleet swift-ships might be sent after him as well. Those were faster than Whisperknife; their cursed daemon crews could operate at high gees with no trouble at all. And though his Whisperknife was heavily armed for a void-runner swift-ship, she would still be outgunned by a Fleet swift-ship.
But Nas was content to let them look; the odds of them finding the Whisperknife were really quite small. What Nas had done could only work in a busy system like Yuro, where the FTL emergence of a ship was a very common event... because Whisperknife had never left the Yuro system. Instead, Nas had taken the risk of a high-stress transit and emerged on the other side of the system's star, still in the Yuro system. A few hours' careful watch and he had been able to ascertain that the guard-ships were still in orbit of Yuro V, not vectoring towards him; that meant they had no idea he was still here. Likewise, there was no sudden burst of activity from any swift-ships, if there were any, in orbit of Yuro-III where the local system defense fleet main base was.
So now Whisperknife could drift silently, watching the system and letting her singularity reactor restabilize, while Nas decided what to do next.
"Alright," he said, aloud, relishing the sound of his own voice, "I think we can stand down. Crew can get out of the 'pods. Let's have FTL Navigation start running some transit numbers; give me an option for every system within easy transit.
"Weapons... Xulios, make sure the tubes are clear and ready to load, and make sure the lasers are in good shape; we didn't run them too hard, but make sure they're at one hundred percent."
"Right," the ordinance master said.
"Warez," Nas went on, "stay on the sensors. I want you to keep the main optics on our local system defense fleet friends, but otherwise scan everything. If so much as a grain of dust or an energetic photon comes our way, I want to know about it."
"Got it, Captain."
"Good," said Nas. "Senny, get your Engineering monkeys and go over the ship from end to end. If it's broken, fix it; if it looks like it might break soon, make sure it doesn't. And then get some rest. That goes for everyone who's not on watch. Make sure of your systems and then stand down. We give the reactor time to stabilize and then we're out of here."
All in all, Whisperknife had come through in good shape, Nas thought. Reaction mass was a bit down, but not critical yet; a singularity reactor gave so much power to the plasma drives that a little reaction mass could go a long way. The ship's lasers were in good shape too; Whisperknife hadn't needed to use them hard, so serious heat buildup hadn't been an issue. The expenditure of seven warheads was another matter. The value of the new warheads, none of which had been used, was much greater, but Nas intended to keep those for his own use. Which meant that as far as liquid wealth went, he had actually lost out on this job. That was unfortunate, but not a disaster. There were reserves, and the syndicate might be willing to extend a loan if those ran dry...
There were times when Nas might dwell on this sort of thing, sometimes to plan his course, and sometimes just to stoke the anger that he used for his edge. But just now the whole matter had little appeal. The mission had succeeded, and Nas felt more satisfaction than wor
ry.
He turned to Ylayn, who was standing poised beside him, and smiled. Ylayn was very good at her job, and the ship needed a data intrusion expert. So she would have had a place on his ship even is hadn't been exotically lovely and an extremely skilled lover. And of course, if a good fuck was all she was, she wouldn't have had a place here at all. But, as she liked to say, it was good to mix business with pleasure.
He slowly looked her up and down, taking in the compact lithe figure, little of which was hidden by the minimal clothing she had reverted to as soon as she was back aboard the Whisperknife. He didn't particularly like the feline features or the fur that was her latest Modification, but hers was smooth and soft as velvet, and fur or no fur, she was the most skilled bed partner he knew. It would be good to relax.
"Ylayn?" he said, smiling, turning her name into a question.
"Yesss..." she answered, which was all the answer he needed.
"OK," he said, his smile growing. "Go on back to my quarters, get out of what
you're wearing, and wait for me. I'll be there as soon as I help out with the status check... Unless you're too worn out from whatever boy-toy you fucked to get those access codes?"
"Not at all worn out, Captain," said Ylayn with a bright smile, the tip of her tongue tracking across her dainty pointed teeth. Her eyes glittered. "I like my work, but there's no way I'd let it get in the way of my play."
---
Labeck Pyer unplugged the secure data feed cable from the interface port at the back of his neck with a faint click, more felt that heard, and slowly stretched, flexing shoulders and arching his back. His body had barely moved for most of the last two standard hours.
At length Pyer allowed himself a thin smile. One bit of clean-up done at last. The Ulia's Flower, the freight-liner that had deliberately escaped destruction, was now destroyed. Of course, it was not the actual destruction of the ship that mattered; it was that the destruction of the ship would call the right sort of attention to itself. People would be wondering why. Which was what Pyer and his masters wanted them to wonder. The plan was still too complex, but at least this part was working.
But now there was one more bit of clean-up to attend to; the void-runner ship that had destroyed the freight-liner. Luckily, that bit was going to be easy. In fact, it would take care of itself. Each of the warheads he had obtained for the pirate had a simple nano-scale timer, separate from, but linked into the weapons' control systems. Isolated from the control system of the weapons and so small as to be almost indetectable, there was no practical way that the pirates could have found the timer modules, even assuming that they had checked.
Each timer had been running down from the moment they had received his coded signal, broadcast as soon as he had confirmed the initiation of the attack on the freight-liner. That had been the only worry; if the void-runner ship had FTL'd out of the system quickly enough, before the light-lagged signal reached them, they would have escaped. But they hadn't... not in time.
And now, in less than twenty hours, the activated timers would reach zero, and then the little nano-structure modules would begin to grow, integrating with the detonator control systems of each warhead. Once they were integrated, they would simultaneously activate the detonators of each warhead. Idly, Pyer hoped that whatever system the pirate ship had transited to, it would be in deep space when the warheads detonated. He didn't want to cause needless collateral damage.
---
"Look at this," said Muir.
He and Freya had taken stock after a few exhausted minutes of just sitting, next to the smoldering wreck of their skimmer and the body of their attacker. Freya still felt that she could not get a good purchase on what had just happened.
Her injuries were mostly no worse than the equivalent of bad bruises, and even the burns would heal, or be easily repaired. But Freya found herself shaking and unable to stop, a psychosomatic reaction. She had been in battle before, had been shot at before. But that was aboard a ship, in space, and even though it seemed to Freya that the danger of death was the same, she could see that her reaction to this was going to be different.
They had searched the body of their attacker, and looking around, had found his skimmer touched down neatly in the same clearing which they had crash landed in. Freya, with her hands still shaking, had taken off the man's helmet. A quick check had shown that he was human, and very dead. He was no one Freya knew, though she could not shake the feeling that she might have seen this man before. Muir found no familiarity at all. They had checked the man for more weapons, but he was unarmed except for the laser.
Next they had checked the man's aircar, a nice looking skimmer with a retractable canopy. It was a four-seater, if you stretched the definition of seats to include the little padded shelves behind the two real seats. According to its logo, the skimmer was a Synergy Electron IV. Freya did not recognize the make; nothing strange about that, she had never before been to this world, and only a handful of aircar makers were interstellar. But the basic type was familiar enough; an expensive toy, made to go fast and feel faster. They had found a spare charge clip for the laser lying on the passenger seat. When they looked, the traffic computer in the dashboard was still running a tracking program, looking for the traffic code of some other aircar. It wasn't finding it, but Freya suspected that their own wrecked skimmer was the target of the search. The laser fire, or the crash, must have destroyed the traffic beacon that the computer was searching for. But there was no doubt that this man had been hunting for them, tracking their skimmer and armed to attack them.
Muir said, "I think I found his personal comp." He was holding up a small cylinder, the size of a pen or a stylus, that looked nothing like a wrist-comp.
Muir's words gave her something else to focus on, and she gratefully turned her attention to what he had found.
"What is it?" she asked.
"A portable computer. Like a wrist-comp, but concealed. I thought it was a data entry stylus, but then there was no wrist-comp to use it with. But when you open this cap, you've got a standard data port. And when you press this stud," Muir showed her, "you get it to open, like this, and there's a holographic interface."
"Neat toy," Freya said. "This fellow was obviously after us, but there's a lot I don't get here. No spare weapon. I've never heard of an assassin or gunman who didn't carry a spare weapon. Not even a shock-stick or a knife."
Muir nodded. "The secret porta-comp is right out of some cheap spy drama. Why not have a normal wrist-comp?"
Freya said, "Maybe this guy's wrist comp was full of stuff he didn't want anyone to see. I don't think he was a..." she shuddered as she spoke, "...professional assassin." She paused to draw another long breath. The shaking was still there, but she was beginning to get control of it. She tried not to dwell on what would have happened had the man been a professional. "Can you tell what's on that concealed computer of his?" she asked.
"Maybe, Captain. It's..." Muir paused as he activated the little comp. "It's not a military encryption. Commercial, I think. A Fleet wrist-comp should be enough for me to crack it."
Freya said, "This guy really was an amateur."
"He almost got us anyway," said Muir, as he set his own wrist comp to work, plugging one interface wire into the other computer and another into a socket at the back of his neck.
"Too close," echoed Freya.
Why was an amateur assassin gunning for them? Freya thought. Or maybe just for her? Still, why? She fingered the laser pistol he had used; a 50mm military sidearm laser. The weapon was styled with some useless cosmetic decorations but it seemed solidly made. The controls were familiar enough. The weapon was set to a highly focused pulse, intended to burn through a tough target like a white-hot needle. The pistol was not Fleet issue, and not, she thought, from a system defense fleet either. Or at least not of a sort she had seen yet; the Hegemony's system defense fleets were a vast confederation of separate organizations and standardization was a goal to strive for, not always attained.
The laser was perfectly deadly, whatever the make was.
"Muir," Freya said, coming back to a thought that had briefly bothered her, "why are you carrying a concealed needler?"
"Ah, Captain," Muir smiled slightly, his tone and manner settling back to his usual levity, "you don't, I suppose, have that much familiarity with old lineage politics."
Freya was pleased to see Muir return to his usual manner. Seeing Muir lose his jocular manner had underscored the danger. On the other hand, she was nowhere close to calm herself. "You know I don't, Muir, so get to the point."
"Of course, Captain. When we were informed that you would not be returning to command Ice Knife, I... let us say I suspected that all might not be well. And if I wasn't certain that there would be trouble, well, I also wasn't certain there wouldn't be. I thought a small weapon might be, uhm... fashionable, planet-side, just now." Muir smiled sadly again. "Had I known, I'd have brought an infantry combat laser, or at least a pulse laser sidearm. And another for you."
Freya frowned. "Assassination is not a usual part of Hegemony politics, Muir. Or are you telling me it is?"
"Not a usual part, no. But not unheard of, particularly among powerful lineages out here on the frontier. Well, on the frontier as the Central Throne would see it; I know we're at least three FTL transits from the actual border." Muir made a deprecating gesture, a flip of the hand with his usual grace, then went on, "But something about the situation made me... perhaps a touch nervous, as opposed to just suspicious."
Freya said, "I think I know what you mean. The acro-telestos' 'offer' of promotion to an SDF guard-ship was a trap if ever I saw one. Do you think that the local system archon has suborned him? That there's some sort of intent by the Yuro system against the Central Throne?"